Thursday, January 23, 2014

1/22/14 Day 6 Madrid

Moving to another host today, surprisingly close, still in Lavapies. We are meeting Pepe at his place at 11a.m. We easily find the apartment with only about 6 blocks of distance between our hosts. After meeting and getting to know each other we are given the keys to the place and head out for the day. As Pepe is a software designer he works from home but will be busy until 10:30p.m. We decide to first grab some lunch at the market: baguette, chorizo, Gouda and a 1liter wine juice box, grand total 4 euros, score! We spend a while trying to locate a nice place to eat it and settle on a park overlooking the city with a variety of dogs playing together. Upon sitting down, pulling out our lunch fixins and realizing that a third dog was core begging for food and being yelled at by its owner we come to the conclusion that, we are enjoying our lunch in a dog park...stupid. so we pack up our things and move onward so that we won't be such a tease. We land in the gardens behind the royal palace, a place we have missed open hours 2 times now.

The gardens ended up being overrated and under cared for, but there was some nice bird watching, we saw a little green parrot, and this migrating flock of birds circling and regrouping up in the clouds, a really phenomenal thing to watch, so many birds! Bored of the gardens we walked up to the Temple of Debod, but was on a two hour siesta break so we decided to sit in the park and enjoy the view from the plateau on which the temple rests. Soon after of course the blue sky we had begun the morning with turned to a grey chasm and the rain began to flow. So naturally it was time for a café con leche to wait out the rain. When we returned to the temple it was pretty busy, I think the first time we have seen a tour bus group parked where we were.

The temple was a gift to Spain from Egypt for helping them with flood recooperation. Inside are beautiful hieroglypherics and a few models of what the original temple site in Egypt would have looked like along with a fair amount of sideshows and reading material. By this time early evening the sun about to go down, time for churros! Kevin in his infinite directional skills leads us confidently to what was pointed out to be the best churro place in the city, open 24 hours a day, San Gines. For 3.8 euros we get a plate of 6 fresh churros and a cup of hot dipping chocolate (like a cross between pudding and cocoa) and a seat outside to watch the sunset.

We end the evening at the Reina Sofia museum for our 2nd visit we are able to make it to Guernica by Pablo Picasso. All there is to say is Wow! Such a powerful and moving anti war sentiment. He painted it to spotlight the intentional bombing of a town of innocent women and children. It is also one of the more documented processes of art pieces as famous as Guernica. With a thorough picture capture and sketch collection of the piece through all of its stages. We returned home around 9 to find that there was an extra backpack in the living room, apparently we weren't the only couch surfers for the night, luckily we got the futon not the air mattress! An hour later Rob a 19 year old Australian boy came knocking and then minutes later Pepe who invited us to a flamenco show for only 5 euros. How could we resist. So the four of us went out for some traditional Flamenco music. Amazing and soulful!